Seriously?

I was kicking about Wikipedia yesterday, learning about historical stock market crashes and whatnot, which (if pressed) I could justify as being related to my current research. Over the course of my random walk down Wiki Street, I eventually happened upon a list of words with disputed usages. This page claimed that “Some prescriptivists argue not should not conclude a sentence.” That would mean someone out there thinks that you oughtn’t to say something like (1):

(1) I wish were a rich man, but alas I am not.

Unfortunately, the bane of Wikipedia strikes here; there is no citation for this claim. I choose to disbelieve. I’ve looked at a few prescriptivist books, even the ones I count on to mindlessly report every prescriptivist canard the author has ever heard, and none of them make even the scarcest mention of this supposed controversy. It doesn’t even begin to make any sense. I know prescriptivists say some dumb things, but I think this is below even their threshold. Has anyone else ever heard this claim, or is Wikipedia — dare I say it? — misinformed?

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

I’m glad you both hadn’t heard of it, either. The idea that the “no nots at the end of a sentence” claim was directed at the post-sentential “not” is a seemingly reasonable explanation. Maybe it is right; I suppose that someone might’ve been told not to end a sentence with a not because of the sarcastic “not”, and then extended it to all “not”s. That could explain the Wikipedia example; it’s just a misinterpretation of someone’s attempt to justify their utterly reasonable hatred of sarcastic “not” by calling it a grammatical prescription. Hmmm…..

That’s not the only example on that page I’d never encountered. I have also never heard anyone espouse the “person/people” rule that it mentions (that one should use “people” only if the number is unknown; i.e., one should say “five persons” and never “five people”). Has anyone else actually run across that?

There were also a couple of word usage questions which I hadn’t run across but I can easily see someone having strong opinions about (one diagnoses diseases, not patients; one can not have more than two alternatives; etc.). But the “persons not people” rule, like the “don’t end sentences with “not” rule, strikes me as utterly bizarre. I have trouble imagining it being seriously espoused by anyone except the occasional lone grammar crackpot.

If you really want to find the source of this, you could use the “History” section of the page to find out who originally added that page, and possibly contact him via his user page. Of course, there are roughly 500 edits to that page, and there’s no guarantee you’d be able to reach the person who added it. But you never know until you try. I suspect that if you did manage to hunt down the adder, it would turn out to be that he had heard it from some lone grammar crackpot who was perhaps the only person in the entire world who felt that “not” should not end a sentence, but the adder added it to Wikipedia because he didn’t realize the prohibition wasn’t more widely supported.

Daniel: I checked in my recently-purchased copy of Fowler’s, and it had a reference to some author in 1985 who said this tends to be the case. Which, of course, it’s not. Not even back in 1985 would I have expected to hear, “Seven persons will be coming for Christmas dinner.” I’m glad you think it’s batty as well.

And as for tracking the person down, I like to think that I have better things to do than waste time doing that. I don’t have better things to do, but I like to think it.